There are times when one reads something that provides a moment of sudden illumination. I had that experience with Russell Hittinger’s contribution to this issue. In recent years, I have been struggling with the intuition that the political and social assumptions I’ve held for many years aren’t so much wrong as inadequate. As I wrote last month (“Return of the Strong Gods”), the twentieth century is finally ending. Hittinger may not agree with my assessment of the meaning of populism and what it foretells, but he’s helped me understand why 2017 feels so different from only a few years ago.
The great achievement of Leo XIII was to identify the ecology of a healthy society. It’s one that sustains the three “necessary” societies in harmonious and mutually reinforcing balance. The family or domestic society anchored in marriage answers to our needs as domestic creatures. The Church fulfills our religious end. Civic life engages us as political animals. Each has a distinct character. Marriage accords with a natural law of male and female complementarity. The Church has a supernatural constitution. Political affairs are more open-ended and variable, subject to prudential judgments about how best to organize civic life in order to promote the common good.
As Hittinger explains, modern Catholicism’s outlook developed as a response to the French Revolution. That event, which eventually implicated the entire West, exaggerated the importance of the political realm, deifying the modern nation-state. Pius IX began the work of articulating the Church’s objections to secular modernity’s all-absorbing sociopolitical project. It was Leo XIII, however, who laid down the foundations for modern Catholic social doctrine, urging strategic efforts to rebalance modern societies in ways that defend the proper rights of the domestic and ecclesial societies in an ideological atmosphere that subordinates everything to political and economic ideology. As Hittinger points out, many of the important battles in the early twentieth century concerned the state’s efforts to take control of the education of children away from both parents and the Church—a signal instance of the state’s usurpation of ancient roles of the domestic and ecclesial societies.
As a teen I read George Orwell and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, not Leo XIII. My first years of theological study focused on Karl Barth, whose outlook was profoundly influenced by his recognition that Christianity had to be defended against spiritual conquest by German nationalism. Although I started on the left, over time I came to see that progressivism, even the moderate progressivism of American liberalism, invariably seeks to increase the power of the state. The cultural wars of my lifetime—the war on racism, the war on sexual inequality, and the war on poverty—fell into the same pattern. The state needs to be empowered to make the world anew.